


knocking

by a_novel_idea



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Brainwashing, Kid!Fic, Post-Winter Soldier, Pre-Slash, Recovery, kink bingo, mentions of abuse, reconnecting, this turned out way lighter than i thoght it was going to
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 06:12:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,868
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2098608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_novel_idea/pseuds/a_novel_idea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>James Barnes wakes up in a cabin in the northernmost region of Maine. There are two knives and a loaded handgun within immediate eyesight, all three of them familiar. There’s no one else in the room, and if there is company in the cabin, he can’t hear them. He addresses his wounds next, scrapes and bruises are the most prominent things, but he has a long scratch up his side that’s been neatly cared for and bandaged. His head his clear, but his mouth tastes like week old war rations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	knocking

**Author's Note:**

> This is for my kink bingo square kid!fic. So. Yeah.

Steve wakes up to a missed call and a text message on his phone, both from Natasha. He blinks, and tries to rub the sleep from his eyes. He can hear Sam puttering around in the kitchen, and the television in the front room is set to a dull buzz, and he wonders how long the other man has been up. It doesn’t take him long to join the other man in the kitchen and work his way around until he’s standing in front of the coffee machine watching it brew.

“It’s not going to speed up just because you watch it,” Sam says around a mouthful of toast.

Steve grunts at him, but moves away until he’s leaning against the refrigerator.  Sam finishes his toast and a glass of water that had been sitting on the kitchen counter, and stands to brush Steve out of the way so he can get at what little food they’ve bothered to buy in the last several weeks.

“Natasha called,” Steve says, eyes on the coffeemaker.

“Yeah,” Sam says. “She called me when you didn’t answer. She’s coming by.”

“When did she get back from…”

“Let’s just stick with Europe,” Sam suggests.

“Sure. Europe.”

“No idea. She called pretty early and said she’d be by with breakfast.”

“Real breakfast, or her version of breakfast?” Steve asks.

“I heard that,” a voice says behind him, and he jumps away from the counter and bumps into Sam.

“ _Woman_ ,” Sam says, “do you not know how to knock? What if one of us had been naked?”

“That doesn’t make me want to knock, Wilson,” she says, eyes as sharp as her grin.

“No,” Steve whines. “It’s too early for that.”

“Calm down, Rogers. I promise not to blemish that pretty little head of yours.”

Natasha drops a bag of breakfast sandwiches on the table, and swoops in between Steve and the counter to grab the first cup of coffee. Steve lets her by without complaint; she did bother to bring them breakfast this morning. Sam and Steve settle down at the table, munching steadily on what’s there, and letting Natasha fill them in on what’s been going on in “Europe”. 

“I never thought HYDRA was this widespread,” Sam comments when Natasha has run out of relevant information.

“Fanatics like this,” Natasha says, “they grow like mold. They seep through the cracks of the most fortified house, and they multiply.”

“Why did you text me this morning?” Steve asks, trying to turn the conversation to something that doesn’t want to make him give his breakfast back.

Natasha’s eyes cut to him.

“You would know if you had answered your phone.”

When neither Steve nor Sam says anything, she huffs.

“It’s an address. New York City. Queens, Astoria to be exact.”

“There’s a HYDRA base in Astoria?” Sam asks.

“Probably,” Natasha says, “but the address is for an apartment.”

“You’re being cryptic on purpose, Natasha,” Steve says, and she raises an eyebrow at him.

“It’s Rumlow’s apartment,” she says. “He’s been seen in the area.”

“I thought Rumlow was dead.”

“Which one’s Rumlow?” Sam asks.

“He’s the one who let you go,” Natasha says, “when the Trisk was coming down.”

He nods.

“Besides being HYDRA, what has Rumlow got to do with anything?”

Natasha hesitates, and says quietly, “He may have been involved in the Winter Soldier program.”

 Steve stands from the table, and shuffles back to Sam’s guest room.

“We’ll meet you in New York,” Sam says quietly, once he’s sure the bedroom door has been closed.

“I’ll call Stark.”

***

The apartment building is actually nicer than what Steve would have imagined Rumlow living in. The neighborhood is nice too, clean and tidy and generally safe feeling. The address Natasha sent him is for a brick apartment building on the corner of 38th Ave. and Crescent St., a seven story walk-up that has several children playing outside.

“Isn’t it the middle of the school day?” Steve asks as he and Sam cross the street.

“Public schools got out for summer break last week.”

The front door of the apartment is open, propped that way by an older woman in a rocking chair. She’s got a pile of knitting in her lap and slippers on her feet, and as Steve and Sam slip into the building she calls out to the kids on the sidewalk about staying out of the street. Steve’s shield bumps the wall, muffled by the black cover strapped around it, and the woman turns to glance at them. Steve smiles back at her as Sam tugs them up the stairs.  Several of the doorways they pass are open, home to mothers and sitters and kids that need to be watched.

“This is the floor,” Sam says at the bottom of a set of stairs. He checks the gun in his belt, and Steve drops the shield from his shoulder and slides the cover off. He nods at Sam, and takes the lead, thumping quietly up the seventh set of stairs and turning the corner into the hall.

Unlike the rest of the building, the seventh floor is quiet. All the doors are closed, though Steve can still hear the droning of a TV from one of the apartments, and he and Sam make sure to be as quiet as they can as they advance down the hallway. The text message Natasha sent him said Rumlow lives in apartment 708, and Sam spies the door before he does. Sam takes up a position by the door, and Steve hefts his shield higher up on his forearm. He raises his hand to knock, but doesn’t get the chance before a vicious, high-pitched scream comes from inside the apartment.

Steve props his shoulder against the door and shoves, and the latch gives way without much of a fight. Sam slides in behind him, confined to the rear in the narrow hallway. Steve steps down the hallway quietly, but quickly, feeling Sam keeping close behind him. The screaming continues, becoming a little more hysterical before turning into distressed pleading. Beyond the living room and down another side hallway, Steve and Sam find a little girl crying a litany of ‘getitgetitgetit’ and pointing into the bathroom, hair pushed back out of her face and toothpaste still in the corners of her mouth. She isn’t wearing anything but a nightgown, and her feet are bare. She doesn’t pay either of them any attention, even though she had looked at them when they had both arrived.

“I got it,” a male voice insists. “See? Look, no more spider. It’s dead; I promise.”

“Dead?” she asks.

“Yep, dead.”

“Okay,” she nods.

“Okay, finish brushing your teeth.”

“Okay.”

She waves at Steve and Sam as she goes back into the bathroom, and Rumlow emerges. He’s wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and he has a wad of toilet paper in his hand that Steve assumes contains the carcass of said spider.

“Don’t either of you know how to knock?”

Sam gapes at him as he shoos the two intruders from the hallway. He steps into the kitchen to throw the spider away and starts to piddle around, like Captain America and his tag-a-longs show up to knock his door in every day.

“So, what?” Rumlow asks. “Romanoff finally tracked down that trail I laid? Or did Fury tip you off?”

“Fury’s dead,” Steve says, shoulder tense, shield still gripped in his hand.

“Yeah,” Rumlow snorts, “right. And I’m Queen of England. Who was it?”

“Romanoff,” Sam says, and Steve looks a little betrayed.

Sam shrugs, _what else are we supposed to do?_

“Bitch,” Rumlow mutters under his breath. “So you decided to track me down because, what? You think I had something to do with the Soldier project?”

“Did you?” Steve asks.

“Yes.”

The air in the room grows heavy, both ex-SHIELD agents tense and ready for action. Sam can hear the little girl puttering around the bathroom, and wonders if the kid actually belongs to Rumlow, or if she’s some kind of sick prop. Rumlow is leaning on the kitchen counter, hip cocked out and arms crossed over his chest; Sam can’t decide if it’s because he’s relaxed, or just trying to look that way.

The little girl comes out of the bathroom before Steve can ask any more questions, or throw a punch, none of them know which would come first at this point. She’s not wearing her pajamas anymore, now in a pair of shorts and a green Hulk shirt, and she squeezes by Steve and Same with a polite “Scuse me.” Rumlow takes the hair tie she offers him, and starts to comb his fingers through her dark, wavy hair until he’s pulled it back into a neat braid. When he’s done, he tugs on the end of it, and she asks,

“Why is Captain America in our living room?”

“He and I have some things to talk about.”

“Oh,” she pauses. “Can we go to the zoo tomorrow?”

“We’ll see, kiddo. You going downstairs to play with the boys?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t leave the block.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t run down the stairs, either. And mind your manners. And stay out of the street.”

“Okaaaaay,” she groans, and Sam didn’t think it was possible for eight year olds to sound so exasperated.

“And put some shoes on.”

She trudges back down the hall way to what the other two men assume is her bedroom, and she reappears quickly with her feet shoved into a pair of sandals. She waves at them as she jogs out of the apartment, careful to step over the mess at the door, and all three men hear her say,

“Hey, Yasha, Captain America’s in our living room!”

When none of them can hear her bounding down the hallway anymore, a rough voice from the doorway says,

“Jesus Christ, Stevie. Doesn’t anyone in this century know how to knock?”

***

James Barnes wakes up in a cabin in the northernmost region of Maine. There are two knives and a loaded handgun within immediate eyesight, all three of them familiar. There’s no one else in the room, and if there is company in the cabin, he can’t hear them. He addresses his wounds next; scrapes and bruises are the most prominent things, but he has a long scratch up his side that’s been neatly cared for and bandaged. His head his clear, but his mouth tastes like week old war rations.

His muscles ache when he stands, but he doesn’t let that stop him from getting to his feet and taking in his full surroundings. He’s wearing a well-worn tshirt and a pair of underwear, but there are no other clothes in the room. He checks both knives, tucks one in his waistband, and decides to leave the gun; as handy as they can be, if he’s here against his will, the sound of a shot will only draw unwanted attention. He creeps out the door, and down a hallway into a living room that’s the width of the cabin. There’s no TV on the wall, or a radio making noise, but there is a man on a couch, asleep with his arms crossed over his chest. He takes this man in: dark hair, tall stature, no kind of pushover, and a name dances on the tip of his tongue.

“Rumlow,” he says out loud, and the man’s eyelids flutter before blinking open. He sits up and yawns, but makes no move to leave the couch.

“Hey, Yahsa,” the man say quietly, hand coming up to scrub through his hair.

Yasha doesn’t sound right, but he doesn’t say so. When Barnes remains quiet, Rumlow’s eyes clear and he sits up properly on the couch.

“What do you remember?”

“James Barnes, 325570 – ”

“Stop,” Rumlow commands quietly, and Barnes does so out of habit.

“Your name is James Buchannan Barnes,” Rumlow says seriously. “It’s 2014. You’ve been a hostage of HYDRA for seventy years.”

“HYDRA,” Barnes echoes.

“Questions?” Rumlow asks.

Barnes shakes his head slowly, and retreats back to the room he woke up in.

***

“Sometimes it takes him a few months out of the locker before he really starts to remember anything, sometimes it only takes days.”

Rumlow says this with a casualness that doesn’t fit the situation. Steve Rogers and Sam Wilson are still standing like lumps in his living room, and what used to be the Winter Soldier is trying to rearrange the takeout containers in the fridge to make room for a fresh gallon of milk.

“You’re HYDRA,” Steve says like the idea of a double agent confounds him.

“In the beginning,” Rumlow agrees. “But not in a very long time.”

“No offence,” Sam says, “but you don’t just stop being HYDRA. It’s a lifetime commitment, or death.”

“You don’t think of it that way when you’re young,” he says quietly. “On the surface, HYDRA is everything you could ever want, good morals, good money, a purpose in life. That’s how they sell it to you; they snatch you up when you’ve got nothing to stand on and by the time you realize what’s happening, it’s too late.”

“Who’s Melony?” Barnes asks from the fridge.

Rumlow winces.

“Sorry,” Barnes says.

“Why is Melony important?” Steve asks Barnes.

“I don’t…”

The other three men watch as James Barnes slips away and something else steps in. It isn’t the Winter Soldier, but maybe the in between, maybe a piece of Barnes that’s stuck between who he was and who HYDRA made him. Rogers takes a step towards him, but Rumlow shakes his head, and the Captain hesitates. The plates of Barnes’s cybernetic arm sigh and shutter under his shirt, and he slowly blinks his way out of whatever hole he had been in.

“Pierce,” Barnes says suddenly, casting a wary eye at the milk skill in his hands.

“Is dead,” Steve says.

“Good,” the other man says, shoving the carton in where it doesn’t quite fit and snapping the door closed.

There is a silence in the kitchen that isn’t very comfortable, and Rumlow feels that he has to break it.

“So, now what?”

“What do you mean?” Barnes asks.

Rumlow rolls his eyes. “Your best friend of ninety years just broke my door in to come and rescue you from the hands of a HYDRA agent. Can’t imagine he’s going to be too keen on leaving you behind.”

“Oh.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Rumlow snorts.

Steve stands tense in the living room, shoulders tight and hands clenched. Barnes’s left wrist ticks, but he doesn’t make a move to say anything else.

“Yeah,” Rumlow says, “You two can talk this out. I’m going downstairs to see if Ella Mae needs help moving that chest of drawers.”

The ex-HYDRA agent moves out of the kitchen to hunt for a clean pair of socks before shoving his feet into a pair of well-worn boots. He sticks around just long enough to say,

“One of you assholes put my door back.”

The three men left stand in awkward silence, broken only by the constant whirring in Barnes’s arm, and Sam says, “I’m going to keep an eye on Rumlow. Call me when you’re done, Cap. It was nice to meet you again, Barnes.”

“Yeah. Sorry for, uh, pulling the steering wheel out of your car.”

The giggle that leaves Steve’s mouth may be a little hysterical.

***

Sam finds Rumlow on the first floor talking to the older woman who had been sitting in the doorway when he and Steve had arrived. She’s a little taller that he would have thought, and she’s still wearing a house coat and slippers; her lap full of knitting has been shoved into a canvas bag and kicked under the chair in the hallway. Rumlow raises an eyebrow at him, but doesn’t protest the help, and introduces him to her as just ‘Wilson’.

Ella Mae gives him a one over, and says to Rumlow, “This better not be your new fella. I like the old one.”

Sam shakes his head desperately and Rumlow laughs at him, “Hello no, Ella Mae. This one’s attached to the big blonde one that came up earlier.”

“The blonde one ain’t your new fella either, is he? He’s not as pretty as the old one.”

“Ella Mae,” Rumlow says, “What’s this about me getting a new fella?”

“Just waitin’ to snatch him up, is all,” she says, but something must have quieted her alarm because she doesn’t ask anything about Rumlow and his ‘fella’ again.

He and Rumlow end up rearranging furniture all afternoon. Ella Mae sends them one way with the couch before deciding that she doesn’t like it where they put it because now it’s too close to the TV. Well, maybe they should put it back where the moved it the first time, and move the TV instead. When Rumlow glances down at his watch, it’s four-thirty and they’ve been rearranging Ella Mae’s living room for going on five hours.

“Tell me where you want this couch, woman,” Rumlow demands. “I’ve got people to feed.”

“Right there under the window is fine,” she says absently, and he and Sam set the couch down from where they picked it up.

“You have got to be kidding me,” Sam groans under his breath, and Rumlow stifles a laugh in a cough.

“Thank you boys so much! You got it just how I wanted it!”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Rumlow says, stooping to peck the woman on the cheek.

“I’ll call the children in,” Ella Mae says. “Don’t want anyone out passed dark.”

“You do that,” Rumlow says as she shuffles away.

“So,” Sam says. “You and Barnes?”

“We are what we are, and we’re not what we’re not, and the rest of it isn’t your business,” Rumlow says lowly.

“Damn right it isn’t,” Sam says just as the dark haired girl comes bouncing through the building’s front door.

Rumlow scoops the girl into his arms, and she squeals, trying to squirm away as he throws her over his shoulder and turns towards the stairs.

“You hungry?” Rumlow asks.

“Yes,” she says, curling her arms around his neck. She looks at Sam. “Who are you?”

“I’m Sam. Who are you?”

“I’m Eleanor,” she says, waving at him. She switches back to Rumlow, “Did you and Captain America talk?”

“Yep. Then he stayed to talk to Yasha. Sam came down to help me move Miss. Ella Mae’s couch.”

“I don’t like that couch,” Eleanor whispers loudly. “It smells like mayonnaise.”

“Let’s keep that to ourselves, kiddo,” Rumlow suggests, and Eleanor nods.

“What’s for dinner?” Eleanor asks.

“I don’t know. We left Yasha upstairs, so it’s his choice.”

“Oh,” she pauses. “Can we go to the zoo tomorrow?”

“We’ll see.”

***

Barnes watches Rumlow walk out the door, and is afraid he won’t have any steady ground to stand on. Steve is standing on the other side of the room, behind the island, shield still in his hands and shoulders curved forward like they used to when he was small. That’s an odd thought; sometimes he doesn’t realize how much he’s remembered until he has a reason to think about it. He remembers Steve when they were kids, huddling for warmth because their parents couldn’t afford to turn the heat on; he remembers back alleys, and bar fights, and dancing; he remembers gunshots, and plane rides, and long, solitary nights in ditches, surrounded by his countrymen. He remembers blood on his hands, and silence so loud it rings in his ears; he remembers what bones feel like when they break under his hands; he remembers targets, not people, and _your work has been a gift to mankind. You shaped the century. And I need you to do it one more time..._

He blinks, comes back into focus, and Steve isn’t standing so far away now. He’s propped his shield against the wall and is hovering three feet away. Barnes’s arm sighs, releases the tension that builds up whenever he has a flashback. He flexes the fingers on both hands, tries to pull the knots out of his shoulders.

“Does that happen often?”

“Not as much as it used to.”

Steve nods, not because he understands, he could never understand this, not completely, but he feels like he has to do something. His fingers itch to reach out and touch, to make sure that this Bucky is real, not just another waking terror, but he doesn’t. He can’t. He’s reached out before, destroyed the illusion of reality and sorely wished he could have gone back to the dream. He isn’t going to touch this time, isn’t going to ruin it; he’s going to be as selfish as he can because this won’t last forever.

***

When Rumlow, Eleanor, and Sam make it up the last flight of stairs, someone has put the door back on its hinges. Rumlow moves the it carefully, just because someone set it up right doesn’t mean they reattached it to the frame, and steps down the hallway, dropping Eleanor and instructing her to go change out of her play clothes. She wizzes by the kitchen, shouting a loud “Hi, Yasha! Hi, Captain America!” before disappearing down the hall and into her bedroom.

Barnes and Rogers are still in the kitchen, Rogers sitting at the island, and Barnes moving around the room like he does when he can’t sit still. Both of them are more at ease than Rumlow has seen them yet, and he decides that going downstairs was the right decision. They’re talking quietly, and Rumlow can’t tell what about, but the corner of Barnes’s mouth is tipped up, so he doesn’t imagine it’s anything troubling.

He stops in the doorway, leans against the jamb, and just watches. Barnes is all smooth lines and sharp angles, even after weeks of near-inactivity. He hasn’t put on any weight, his body still picky about being able to handle real food after half a century of living off of intravenous fluids. His hair is still long, but he’s clean-shaven, and he didn’t have to be prompted to bathe after the first few days of recovery. Rumlow’s grateful that this transition from Soldier to, he wants to use the word civilian, but Rumlow knows Barnes will never be that, something else has been so smooth; there have been wakeups full of screaming, nightmares, lashing out, trauma. Sometimes, when he’s spent too long in the cold, he can still feel the scar tissue pull over his ribs.

Rogers catches sight of them in the door and nods, but the small smile doesn’t leave his face. He’s set his shield off to the side, and Barnes doesn’t have a knife in any visible spot, so Rumlow counts this as a win.

“You two figure it out?” he asks, and Barnes’s answering grin is so sweet it’s heartbreaking. It’s the kind of smile that wouldn’t be so noticeable if he wasn’t so sad all the time.

“Yeah,” Rogers says. “We got it figured out.”

“Is Captain America staying for dinner?” Eleanor asks as she trots out of her room in clean pajamas.

“If he wants,” Rumlow shrugs, moving into the kitchen.

“Sam can, too?”

“Yeah, kiddo, Sam, too.”

 


End file.
